A tear ran down her cheek. I reached over and held her hand.
‘They clipped a tree in the garden during take-off. The official report said it was the pilot’s fault. He was also killed in the crash, so I suppose it’s easy to blame him.’
She was silent for a while.
‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. ‘I don’t do that very often any more.’
‘There’s no reason to be sorry,’ I said. ‘I still cry sometimes over my mother and she’s been dead now for twenty-four years. Sometimes I have difficulty recalling her face, and I haven’t been able to hear her voice in my head for longer than I wish to remember.’
‘What about your dad?’ she asked.
‘I don’t usually talk about him much. He went off the rails after my mother died. He couldn’t cope without her. Everything in the house, cooking, washing, cleaning and so on, he left for my sister to do. He started drinking too much and lost his well-paid job with the council because of it. He ended up as an assistant gardener in a local park but he was usually legless. He was only kept on due to the kindness of his old council chums who felt sorry for him.
‘I actually remember him really well. He was drunk a lot of the time, but he was always kind and loving towards me, even if he wasn’t ever particularly happy. He drank himself to death in the end, although the official cause was pneumonia.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen,’ I said. ‘I can remember his funeral as if it was yesterday.’
‘Who then looked after you?’
‘Faye. My sister. She’s twelve years older than me. She became my official guardian. Then I joined the army at eighteen.’
‘Which regiment?’
‘The Intelligence Corps,’ I said, making a mock salute. ‘Two-five-one-nine-eight-two-four-one, Captain Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley, at your service.’
‘Jefferson Roosevelt?’ she said incredulously. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘I am not,’ I said in my most superior tone of voice. ‘My parents clearly admired dead American presidents.’
Henri laughed.
‘Don’t you start,’ I said. ‘I was endlessly bullied at school because of it.’
But at least it had taught me to fight, and that had always been an asset, not least during the previous night.
21
After constant badgering, the doctors finally agreed that I could go home on Sunday morning. I think they were glad to see the back of me — I know the nurses were. They didn’t appreciate having a potential killer on the prowl.
To be honest, and for the same reason, I was grateful when Quentin arrived in his BMW to drive me to Richmond rather than to my flat in Harlesden.
I’d been in hospital for a whole week but, in many ways, it seemed longer.
I was eager to get back to work in spite of the dire warnings I’d been given by Doctor Shwan about having to take things easy for a while. In particular, I wanted to continue my look into Bill McKenzie’s riding and the gambling habits of Leslie Morris, and to rescue the investigation from the desk of Paul Maldini.
Was it just eight days since I’d met Henrietta Shawcross at Sandown Park races? It seemed that I had known her for ever.
She had come into the hospital on Saturday afternoon and we had watched the Channel 4 coverage of racing at Cheltenham and Doncaster.
‘I’m sorry I can’t stay late tonight,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going to a dinner at the Dorchester. It’s the Christmas party for all our UK staff and their wives. We do it every year.’
‘For Reynard Shipping?’
‘Yes. I promised Uncle Richard I’d be there.’
‘Will your cousin Martin also be there?’
‘Oh, yes. He’s the host tonight. That’s why he’s over here.’
‘From the Cayman Islands?’ I’d asked.
‘From Singapore. He has a place in the Caymans, but he spends much of his time in Singapore running our operation out there, although he was here for most of the summer restructuring the UK business. He’s our new managing director, now that Uncle Richard is taking things a bit easier.’
‘Well, I hope you have a great evening,’ I’d said. ‘Much better than staying here.’
‘I doubt that. The Christmas party always turns into a nightmare. Everyone drinks too much and then they start telling me what they really think of us.’
‘Which is?’
‘That we don’t pay them enough, we have too many Asia-based staff, and that the company makes the family too much money.’
‘And does it?’
‘No. My great-grandfather took a job as a stevedore in the London Docks after returning from the battlefields of France in 1918. He started his own ship-loading business in 1920 and, since then, it’s been the Reynard family that has built the business up to what it is today, so why shouldn’t we enjoy the spoils?’
It sounded to me like something she was well used to justifying.
‘Everyone who works for us is well paid. We certainly have no trouble recruiting from our competitors. And, these days, our main hub is in Singapore, so we are bound to have lots of Asia-based staff, aren’t we?’
‘Are you much involved?’
‘I sit on the board as a non-exec director.’
‘But you work full-time elsewhere?’
‘Yes,’ she’d said.
I had been desperate to ask her why, but I’d said nothing. She would tell me if she wanted to. And she did.
‘I run a recruitment agency in Fulham,’ she had said finally.
‘You told me at Sandown that you worked for an agency, not that you ran it.’
‘I didn’t want to brag. I set it up from scratch about six years ago after a friend complained how difficult it was to get catering staff for her kids’ parties, and it’s sort of blossomed from there into quite an enterprise. I now have six full-time employees, including me, and literally hundreds of people on our books. Clients come to us with their requirements and we act as the middlemen, putting them together with our self-employed chefs, waiters and waitresses. We do all the contract work and arrange payment to the staff. And we charge the clients a fee for doing it all.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘It is,’ she’d said, beaming. ‘The agency makes a healthy profit and it’s all because of me rather than my family.’
I could see how important that was to her.
‘I’ve just started a section recruiting entertainers and magicians for events.’
I could do with a magician, I thought, to make Darryl Gareth Lawrence disappear.
Faye fussed around me like a mother hen, insisting that I sit on the sofa in their sitting room with my feet up.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, thank you.’
I had talked Quentin into going home to Richmond via Harlesden to pick up some things from my flat.
‘Will it be safe?’ he’d asked.
‘What has Faye been telling you?’
But my safety was indeed a big concern.
Twice I’d made Quentin take a detour in the journey up Harrow Road towards Harlesden while I watched to see if anyone was tailing us.
Satisfied that there wasn’t, I’d still made him drive slowly past my flat three times until I was sure that no one was waiting in the bushes for my arrival.
Remembering what had happened last time, I’d been even more wary as I’d put the key into the lock, stepping back from, rather than through, the open front door as I’d done before.